This invention relates to the field of information searching and browsing. Computer users are increasingly finding navigating document collections to be difficult because of the increasing size of such collections. For example, the World Wide Web on the Internet includes billions of individual pages. Moreover, large companies' internal Intranets often include repositories filled with large numbers of documents.
Finding desired information in such large collections, unless the identity, location, or characteristics of a specific document are well known, can be difficult. Generally speaking, each document has an address, or Uniform Resource Locator (URL), in the form “http://www.server.net/directory/file.html”. In this notation, the “http:” specifies the protocol by which the document is to be delivered, in this case the “HyperText Transport Protocol.” The “www.server.net” specifies the name of a computer, or server, on which the document resides; “directory” refers to a directory or folder on the server in which the document resides; and “file.html” specifies the name of the file.
Obviously, a user cannot be expected to remember a URL for each and every document on the Internet, or even those documents in a smaller collection of preferred documents. Accordingly, navigation assistance is not only helpful, but necessary. Modern Web browsers (software applications used to view and navigate documents on the Web) have introduced the concept of “bookmarks” or “favorites” (collectively referred to as “bookmarks” in this document). Bookmarks allow a user to identify which documents the user would like to keep track of, and to reload and view the sites' contents at any desired time without having to remember the specific URLs.
The bookmarks can be stored locally on the user's computer or on a remote server where the bookmarks can be accessed through a network, such as the Internet or an Intranet. Storing the bookmarks on a remote server offers the advantages that a user can access her bookmarks from any computer having the necessary hardware and software to access the remote server, and that several users can use the same computer and still have access only to their own personal list of bookmarks.
Current versions of web browsers store and maintain a user's bookmarks on the user's local computer. Typically, the web browsers only permit limited manipulation of a user's collection of bookmarks. For example, a user can create and modify a hierarchy of bookmarks, modify titles paired with the URLs, search for words within the titles or URLs, and often derive some additional information about the bookmarks, such as the date and time of the user's most-recent visit to the site, the collected number of visits, and possibly other information.
Various companies, such as Google Inc. of Mountain View, Calif., provide toolbars that can be installed in various browsers to provide additional functionality. For example, current implementations of the Google Toolbar have a bookmark feature that allows a user to bookmark a currently displayed web page by simply clicking a button on the toolbar. The button becomes highlighted, which serves as an indicator each time the web page is displayed that the current web page has been bookmarked. By clicking the same button a second time, a user is presented with a list of editing operations that can be performed on the bookmark, such as renaming the bookmark, removing the bookmark, applying or removing one or more labels for the bookmark, and creating a new label. Whereas these editing operations typically are useful in terms of the features and functionality they offer, they typically require the user to go through several steps and possibly enter information in several windows, menus, or dialog boxes that are displayed. Thus, it would be useful to have simpler and more efficient ways for users to save, edit, and remove bookmarks.